Good times there, right? I’ve seen snow piled up on a bike rack before, but this was particularly egregious. Every car parking spot in the lot was cleared. Not a spot of snow to get in the way of people parking their cars. So where to put that snow? Well, let’s just dump it on top of the bike rack. Evidently, fellow Providence bike-twitterer, @papabybike was displeased as well. But instead of just dropping a snarky tweet like me, he went in and talked to the manager about it. After a few other tweets, I hear through the grapevine that this particular Whole Foods was planning to install a new bike rack in April. Well it’s April now, and what do you know? Check it out:

Now that is some quality bike parking! Sure, there’s only 4 hoops, but there’s lots of room in between them and it looks like it will easily accommodate 8 bikes parked there at once. In fact, there’s so much room, you could park a cargo bike there!

photo credit: @papabybike

Other Providence bike twiterrers were pleased to see the rack as well.

I realize that this blog is full of snark, cynicism and negativity, but I’ll try to suspend that for a moment and just say THANK YOU, to the management of this particular Whole Foods for taking the time to install a bike rack that looks like it was actually designed by people who ride bikes. It may have taken a while, but they got it right.

Now, what do we have to do to get Eastside Marketplace to install a decent bike rack?

That rack is so bad, the NEXT bike doesn’t even want to lock to it. I mean, I’ve seen better bike parking in a video game that’s based on the idea of stealing cars and running over people with them.

My neighborhood boasts something you don’t see too often, an honest-to-goodness independent grocery store, the Eastside Marketplace. Right next door is a very good liquor store, Bottles. Between them is an abomination of a bike rack.

Earlier this week, I visited Bottles to buy a case of wine. That’s right, I can buy a case of wine and transport it by bike. That earns me both smug points and Bourgeois points (and a 10% discount). This time, however, Spouse came along and transported half of the case by backpack. NO MATTER! I have the potential to transport it all and that makes me feel smug and that is all that is important.

When I got to the liquor store, I found a scene similar to this:

This particular bike rack has been deteriorating over the last few years. It’s a crappy design to begin with. The cyclist has the option of hoisting the bike over the rack as most have done (this can scratch the frame and possibly damage the headset), or lock only the wheel (as I did when I took this picture).

I’m okay with doing this for short periods of time because I have locking skewers. I would not recommend this for cyclists with quick-release or bolt-on wheels. You can find this type of rack many places. It’s kind of an old-fashioned idea of what a bike rack should be, and amazingly enough, they are still being built. This one has deteriorated to the point where many of the bars have either fallen off or were removed to facilitate bike theft:

The rack was pretty full when I showed up and I had had enough of this crappy rack! So, I brought my bike into Bottles. The young woman at the front said, “there’s a bike rack right outside there.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not a real bike rack, I can’t use it – would you mind if I leave my bike up here while I shop?” I replied.

Another clerk chimed in, “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s not a real bike rack, but it does suck. You can leave your bike here if you like.”

Spouse and I picked out our wines (that is to say, Spouse picked 11 bottles and I picked 1 – I’ve never quite developed a wine palate). When I got home, I started drafting an angry email to the manager of Eastside Marketplace. After writing the draft, I decided to sit on it for a day, which is always a good idea when one writes an angry email.

The next day, I received an e-newsletter from Bottles. I’m on their email list, so I’m used to seeing their e-newsletters. Shortly after that, I got a second email from the manager informing me about some sort of special bourbon. I seized on this opportunity, and replied to the manager’s email thusly:

I’m happy to receive your emails and I enjoy shopping at Bottles. I was very glad when you guys moved into the old Blockbuster space. I have one small complaint that you may or may not be able to address. The bike rack outside your store is in horrible disrepair. I couldn’t properly lock my bike to it last night, so I brought my bike into the store. Your excellent staff was kind enough to watch it for me while I shopped. Does Eastside Marketplace own the bike rack, or is there a landlord for the entire strip who is responsible for it? I would greatly appreciate it if you could talk to whoever is responsible for the rack and ask them to replace it. It’s a poorly designed rack, and now it’s falling apart. Even on a relatively cold night like last night, there were at least 8 bikes parked there, many parked in a way that could damage the bike. More and more people are riding bikes for transportation these days, and businesses that make the investment in quality bike parking can expect to be well-patronized.

[I went on to request that they carry Southern Tier 422 Pale Wheat Ale, because while I may not have a refined palate for wine, I do know my beers and that shit is awesome.]

A few hours later, I received this response:

The “bike rack” outside is a joke — I completely agree with your comments. We are partnering with the Steel Yard to have a new bike rack custom made for us this spring. Stay tuned!

Cheers,

Eric Bottles General Manager

I’ll gladly suffer through the winter if they’re going to end up with a Steel Yard rack. [for those unfamiliar with the Steel Yard, you can check out their work here.] But now what can I do with that angry email to Eastside Marketplace? Post it here, of course. Now that I know they are planning to replace that horrible rack, my rage is no longer justified. Instead, I’ll hold onto this until the next time I come upon dilapidated bike rack.

Imagine a customer drove his car to your store to find that he was unable to safely park his car in the parking lot. There weren’t any lines separating the spaces, so cars were parked in an un-orderly fashion, some pressed right against each other, causing them to scrape against each other. The lot was full of potholes that could damage his wheels. There were shopping carts left all over the place that could scratch his car. There were strips of metal in most of the parking spaces that could damage his car when he pulled in, and somehow, these same metal strips made it difficult to properly lock his car. This made the customer worry about his car while he was shopping. He hurried through the store as quickly as possible. The next time he needed groceries, he went somewhere else.

I’m sure that sounds like a parking nightmare. You wouldn’t put up with a parking lot like that, right? You’d have the lot repaved to get rid of the potholes. You’d paint appropriate lines separating the parking spaces. You would remove those metal strips so your customers’ cars don’t get scratched and they can lock their cars properly. In short, you would make sure that your customers don’t even have to think about the condition of your parking lot. They would drive in, park their cars, do their shopping, load up and go home. And your customers don’t have to think about your parking because you have a perfectly acceptable parking lot. There are plenty of well-marked, properly spaced parking spaces. I’ve driven a car to your store many times, and I’ve always found your parking lot to be perfectly maintained. Your staff does an excellent job of keeping the shopping carts under control. You also accommodate those who take the bus to your store by providing seating for those who wait for the bus.

Although I’ve driven to your store many times, I live less than 2 miles away and I prefer to ride my bike for short trips. The bike parking at Eastside Marketplace is equivalent to the nightmare parking lot I described above. The bike rack in front of your store is poorly designed and in a horrible state of disrepair. Although you may see this type of bike rack installed many places, it does not allow cyclists to properly secure a bicycle. This rack is designed to only secure the bike’s wheel to the rack. If a cyclists only locks the wheel to a rack, a thief can easily release the bolts holding the wheel to the frame and take the frame and rear wheel, leaving only the front wheel. Instead, many cyclists put their front wheel over the rack in order to secure both the frame and front wheel. This can scratch the frame and cause damage to some of the bicycle’s components. The best option is to lock a bike to one of the ends of the rack, but those two spots are usually taken. In addition to it’s poor design, the rack is falling apart. Many of the vertical bars have been removed, I assume by someone trying to steal a bike, or perhaps they just fell off.

I don’t know if Eastside Marketplace owns the property, or rents it from another company. However, I am certain that you would never allow your parking lot to deteriorate to a similar condition. I hope that you will consider installing a new bike rack that will allow your customers to properly park their bikes. Please take the time to consult with someone who rides a bike before choosing a new bike rack.

Ah, that’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it? Probably one of the best screeds I’ve ever written, and now I don’t even get to send it. Did you see how I casually mentioned that I’ve driven a car there? That’s to show that I’m not some lunatic who only rides his bike everywhere. Of course, I fail to mention that I drive a car there maybe twice a year nowSpeaking of lunatics, I saw these two parked at the farmers’ market the other day.

That’s the rare, elusive “shopper” version of the Elliptigo. Here’s the sporty version, captured on Blackstone Blvd.

I finally had my last appointment with the orthopedist this week. (For those coming to this blog more recently – I was seeing an orthopedist due to breaking my collarbone, which happened when I fell off of my bike.) It had been a long time since I visited the hospital. The last time I went, I took the bus because I was not yet cleared to ride. This time, I took my bike.

The bike parking at Rhode Island Hospital is… lacking. The bars on this railing are unusually deep so I couldn’t reach my lock through the bars and around my frame when the bike was resting on the ground. Instead, I had to lift my bike up a few inches and allow it to rest on the top bar of the railing. It rested on my left (front) shifter. Not ideal, but I’ve done it before.

With a good U-lock locked to a thick metal railing, I should feel pretty secure with how my bike is parked. There is quite a bit of foot traffic at the main entrance to the state’s largest hospital. It seems unlikely that a casual bike thief would be able to do anything to my bike, and it is not in a setting that a dedicated bike thief would touch. And yet, I still didn’t feel completely secure. In an overly security-conscious world, a hospital employee could see this bike as a threat and have it cut off. Seems unlikely, but it’s been known to happen. Perhaps I’m just paranoid. Comes from riding in traffic.

Here’s my latest X-ray:

And here’s what I looked like back in March right after the accident:

As you can see, the yellow pain lightning is gone, and that pesky red arrow finally went away. Along with that, my bones have knitted themselves back together, but now in a different and more exciting shape. How fun!

That’s Spouse’s city bike. I borrowed it in order to buy a bag of charcoal (I also bought a watermelon). The rack on Spouse’s bike is a little wider and more conducive to strapping large objects to it. The same day, I had a big box strapped back there with a charcoal grill in it, but I neglected to take a picture. I believe that may have been the single largest item I’ve carried on a regular bike without a trailer.

I always liked the look of Spouse’s bike – I think it’s the subtle integrated maple leaf motif on the seat tube…

I’ve been writing a few “barely locked” posts lately, so I figured that today I would feature a properly locked bike. I often see this Raleigh parked at a local supermarket – my guess is that it belongs to an employee.

You can see that the owner has properly lace the U-lock through the frame, the front wheel and rack. That’s my Raleigh parked next to it – rather casually with my lock laced just through the rack and my wheel. (I’ve never removed the front wheel on this bike – my guess is that the nuts are rusted on there pretty good).

That is a good looking bike. The orange really stands out and it’s in good condition. My guess is that it’s ca. mid-70’s but I don’t really know. The only accurate way that I know how to date a Raleigh is to look for a stamp on the 3-speed hub, but this is a derailleur model, so I’m not sure (and I didn’t go looking). Still – a very nice looking bike.

I was up at the Seven Stars on Broadway a couple weeks ago. They have two hitching post bike racks at this location, for which I am very grateful. This time of year, they tend to fill up, so I had to park at a street sign a few feet away. I’m not complaining about that though, I’m just happy that they have racks.

But what would this blog be without complaining, right? After all, just like Joe Namath said, “A successful blog is 1% inspiration and 49% perspiration, and 50% kvetching.” So I’ll complain about this poorly-locked bike:

A couple of posts ago, Amanda suggested that I pixilate any future barely locked pictures, for the sake of the children and those reading my blog while goofing around at work. So here goes.

That should at least protect the bicycle’s identity. I can’t really pixelate the “naughty bits” on a barely locked bike, or you couldn’t tell in what manner the bike’s owner improperly locked their bike. That would make it much harder to make fun of them.

As the red arrow points out, this bike is locked by the seatpost. Although it’s not a quick-release seat post, all someone would have to do is undo the hex bolt on the seatpost clamp, lift the seat past the lock, re-insert it, and ride away. This is probably not very likely to happen when the bike is parked right next to a window of a busy coffeeshop (that’s why I was furtively lurking around the corner so no one would catch me taking pictures). But really, the top-tube is right there, mere inches away from the seat post. Couldn’t the cyclist have just locked to that instead?

I guess I should be realistic, it’s not like he was going to leave his bike there for decades, allowing the bike rack to grow around and subsume it like this:

Well, isn’t that a mouthful of a blog post title? We’ll get to that in a second.

In my previous post, I complained about this Specialized parked in Jamestown and that it was one of the worst cases of “barely locked” that I’d seen:

That’s a flimsy cable lock threaded between the fork and the wheel, which would allow a thief to simply remove the wheel, lift up the frame, re-attach the wheel and then ride away. I thought this was one of the worst examples of barely locked until I returned to Providence to find this:

This qualifies for both the “Topless pole-dancing” and the “When I think of you, I lock to myself” types of barely locked bike (see this previous post for my complete “barely locked” taxonomy). I dunno, if one uses two types of ineffective locking techniques at once, does that turn it into an effective locking technique?

I’ve got to take a closer look – ENHANCE!

Yep, that’s pretty stupid.

Now, back to our headline. Before I got dropped from the peloton of the Let’s Go Ride A BikeSummer Games, I completed one of the four events by writing a letter to a local business to cajole them into installing a bike rack. As you probably know, there are few things I love more than getting all hoity-toity with a business owner and insisting that they install some bike racks. Since my cajoling has been successful with two local businesses so far, I decided to set my sights a little higher – like the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart. You can read my polite (but firm) letter here. And while Wal-Mart has not responded directlyper se, they did respond in their own round-about corporate way… by installing bike racks at Wal-Marts in Texas. In fact, so powerful was the prose of my letter, that Wal-Mart went back in time to install these bike racks. Impressive, eh?

Steve A, head of the CarfreePVD branch office in Dallas (aka the completely unrelated and vastly superior to this blog, DFW Point-to-Point) sent me these pictures

Everything's bigger in Texas - including the dead space around the bike racks

I like this bike racks location, back by the auto lube department. It’s also nice that there is a cigarette butt station right next to the rack. I should pay another visit to the Providence Wal-Mart to see if there are cigarette butt disposal units parked out front. And if I see them, I can feel even more self-righteous because Wal-mart would pay to have a place for people to put out their cancer sticks, but not a place for people to park their bikes. Ah, I love that self-righteous feeling, it’s better than smugness.

Big thanks to Steve for sending me the pictures. Kidding aside, it’s interesting to see that a giant company like Wal-Mart will install bike racks for some stores, but not for others. I’m sure they have parking lots, disabled parking, and even wheel-chair specific spots at almost every store. I realize that mode share for cycling is very low in the US (what, 2% nationwide?), but I wonder what percentage of trips are taken by cars with disabled parking tags. And then I wonder what percentage of trips are taken by cars that have actual disabled people in them!

More hot barely locked pics tomorrow! (or whenever I write the next post.)

Before I get to everyone’s favorite topic, bike parking, I have to own up to the fact that I failed in my attempt to complete the Let’s Go Ride A BikeSummer Games. It was the first bicycle competition I’ve ever competed in, and like most new competitors, it resulted in a big fat DNF! Oh well, maybe next year.

Now back to the bike parking.

I had the opportunity to visit Jamestown recently, one of my favorite parts of our little state. For those of you not up on your Rhode Island geography, Jamestown lies on the island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay. It’s not far from Newport, which lies on the next island over which is technically called “Rhode Island”, but everyone calls it “Aquidneck Island” in order to avoid confusion with the rest of the state (the official name of which is actually “Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations”). Got it?

Spouse and I usually take our bikes when we visit Jamestown because riding one loop around the island makes for a pleasant 20 mile ride. The island is so small, that it’s easy to ride from any point on the island into the village where all of the shops are. Imagine my delight when I saw this in the village:

An honest-to-goodness hitching-post style bike rack! It seems that at least 6 of these racks were installed in the central part of the village near the restaurants and shops. Unfortunately, there weren’t any bikes actually locked to the racks, at least not while I was walking by. Meanwhile, there were several bikes casually leaning up against a wall outside a restaurant instead:

There’s also a bike rack down by the marina, this one designed to accommodate several bicycles.

I think they put it there to distract people from the giant stone monument commemorating the spot where Roger Clemens shook the hand of Cannonball Adderley. Let’s take a closer look:

Ack! This rack is so poorly designed that there’s no way to lock one’s frame when using a u-lock. That doesn’t stop the ride of the Specialized from locking his bike in such a way that anyone with half a brain could walk off with the whole thing.

That’s a flimsy cable lock, but that’s not really the issue. Most people practicing the art of “barely locked” would just lock the front wheel. This would allow a thief to take off with the frame and rear wheel. This isn’t ideal for a bike thief, but if they have a vehicle nearby, they could easily chuck your bike into the vehicle. However, this particular cyclist is one step dumber than that. In case you can’t tell, the lock is only threaded between the fork and the wheel. All a bike thief would have to do is remove the front wheel (easy to do with the quick-release skewers), lift up the frame, re-attach the wheel, and ride away. I’ve seen worse examples in my collection of pictures of “barely locked” bikes, but not many.

In tomorrow’s post we’ll a bike so barely locked it’s scandalous. Plus a look at bike racks at Texas Wal-Marts – just what everyone has been waiting for.